They could look like this when found. Sizes can differ of course ( is really big right now).

It's a rough idea but with some organisation it could work.

It sounds like it could be a neat idea, but keep in mind that mods can see posts that have been edited so that may throw off some balance. I'd say it's worth figuring out to see if it's feasible.

I was more thinking about organizing it in a way that doesn't require moderators to edit them in.

In example for tournament threads, the host can put one/some I supplied in an/some update post(s) or in the OP.For the presentations I can supply them to a number of presenters.I'm not really planning on locating them in 'ordinary' posts.

Also I wasn't planning on 'hiding' them by slapping a 64×64 image in plain view. More a bit similar to how they hide beans in the M&L games, with varying degrees of how hard they are.

Alright, so I've made a small mockup of sorts. In this post I've put two of those 'hidden' spots for y'all to find, and another one is elsewhere on the board to illustrate the global idea of it.

I've picked the general design of the Bean spots from the M&L series for this. When one finds one and clicks on it, they are taken to the overview page and are congratulated on their findings.If you then refresh the page where you found the spot, it will have changed into a green dot to indicate it being found.

This mockup simply uses a session-long cookie to track your status, the full edition will of course function the entire season. Possibly with connected users so they can have the same collection on multiple devices/browsers/whatever or have their cookies erased by CCleaner without losing things.

I can supply these image/link combo's (because that's essentially what it is) to various people for them to hide them in their posts/presentations and stuff so no "« Last Edit: xxxx »" stuff needs to appear.

as for tokens, that really should depend on the amount of tournaments we decide on, the number of people in each tournament maybe, and how difficult they are

mafia it would make sense to have a lot of tokens for, but something like the scavenger hunt i would think should be moderate at best

for larger things like the mafia then i agree to higher token amounts but for game tournaments as while some games are more difficult to learn, all of them realistically (some are luck based mind you) have the same difficultly to win. possibly those that go on for longer should maybe have more tokens assigned to it but that's debatable.

Yeah this scavenger talk is really close to needing it's own thread by now. Will make one soon, on phone atm.

Planting red herrings everywhere is a good idea yeah, knowing how SMF's search works. Having Userpedia's domain in the mix would also be great to screw 'search'ers up, that is much appreciated.

Also on the signature part, I don't think that's the best idea because while possible, it requires 1. that the user has sigs enabled (I know I haven't) and 2. that the user doesn't obscure their referrer headers (the part that tells us where they are).

Of course we do, it's our tenth celebration and we have lots of people. Better make it a blast.

Tokens; if the distribution really was that terrible last year (I didn't really look at it tbh) it should be discussed better yeah. I remember in 2014 people who hosted stated what the absolute maximum was and what the expected max was. Normal game tournaments like MK or Smash should maybe end around 90-100, smaller/calmer things like scavenger maybe 50-60 and large things like Mafia like 150-200 or so.

This is a Scavenger Hunt to find hidden (i.e. not a 64×64px image slapped into a post) collectibles, tentatively called badges. These badges can be hidden all across the [public] Awards Board and some related projects like Awards 'Shroom sections, including but not limited to tournament threads, update posts within these, general discussion threads, and the central ceremony threads including presentations. [-][-]They can also be hidden in popular threads elsewhere on the forum, but then hints will need be given to not completely have them get lost. [-]

The idea is that I create 'hotspots' that can look like a M&L-style beanspot, some other patch thing, or whatever, that can be discussed. These hotspots can then be distributed to people for them to hide in their posts, mostly to people hosting things for aforementioned tournament threads, and to presenters for the ones hidden within presentations for the ceremony. This is to prevent those "Last Edit by Mod" notes down posts.

I have created a mock-up with three badges hidden within the staff board. Here is the central page with a overview of all found badges. This version is per-user and per-browser as it works with a session-length cookie. [-]The eventual public version will work for the season, in addition to being user-bound in order to allow multiple devices to one user, to prevent data loss and to verify which badges have been found by a user without requiring them to report.

Then the URL's of the spots. As it is very easy to just use the search function of the forum to search for fragments of the URL, some measures can be taken. [-][-]Most of the URL's will likely be on my own domain, ltquick.nl. This domain I use just about everywhere on the forum, so it already casts red herrings. [-] Then there is the fact that SMF's search will only return one post per thread, so placing 1px beacons everywhere will lure SMF's search to specifically placed red herrings. Furthermore, 2257 offered the possibility to redirect some hotspots through userpedia.net, which will eventually leave some blue(?) orange herrings. [-][-] Maybe porplemontage can help on that by having the same type of redirect going though mariowiki.com and/or marioboards.com, that can be discussed.

Finally, hiding them in user's signatures is possible, but I wouldn't recommend that. [-] It requires that the user has signatures enabled, which some have not. It also requires that users don't obfuscate their referrer headers, which tell us where they actually are. [-]

All above is more about the hiding principles of the hotspots. The actual badge designs aren't really discussed here. I did include some design I whipped up in the coining post here, which is basically a picture with a white outline and a shadow.

The pictures I would want to make things related to the Mario series, its sister series (Donkey Kong, Yoshi, etc.), and our community ('Shroom, Userpedia). If possible the badge can be related to where they were found (MKTV Lakitu in a Mario Kart thread, Poochy in a 'Shroom presentation, etc), but that is all far ahead of where we are now.

So. Some idea's have been coined in the Tournaments thread (Edo collected them above too), but more ideas are always welcome.

This is pretty neat as I've said, but is it possible to place them on places that aren't posts or threads? Like say could you put a badge on the main page somewhere or something? Idk I'm just trying to throw out possibilities

This is pretty neat as I've said, but is it possible to place them on places that aren't posts or threads? Like say could you put a badge on the main page somewhere or something? Idk I'm just trying to throw out possibilities

Main page of the forum or wiki?

If wiki, yes, fairly easy, only requires help of an admin, though it will be fairly obvious in recent changes.

If forum, yeah, it's technically possible, but it requires the editing of source files, which I don't recommend.Although, I don't know if it would be possible but if board descriptions can contain HTML/BBCode then they can be located in such place.

In both cases they shouldn't be too obvious as they can potentially stay there the entire season.

Last point there reminds me, when this hunt starts, not all findables have been planted yet. The amount of existing hotspots will gradually expand, most appearing during the ceremony for those in presentations.

those urls might be blocked in some places like school, work, etc.would that be a problem?

I think my domain is too obscure to be blocked anywhere, but if it is blocked, hotspots will appear as broken images.That can potentially ruin it, but then again if the hotspots are blocked, so are the links you click on.

I do think thouh that if the Mario Boards aren't blocked, but ltquick.nl is, your place should consider a blocker that actually works.

Also in my experience, blockers can't always block HTTPS connections. If I use that, the problem can be minimized some more.

While the system which caries the game is mostly ready for usage, I think that it is better to do this thing at a later time (i.e. next year or some other occasion).This is because I'm away next week and will likely have little to no phone service, and therefore would only have this week to spread all the badges and create a thread, among other things.

I probably should have worked on this earlier but real life's been pretty meh this year and stuff.This will also allow me to make M2 greater and less hurrysome which means a happy Anton.